Welcome to the Human Race
Produced and directed by Betty Wolpert
SBS TV, Wednesday, November 6, 8.30pm (8pm in SA)
Previewed by Norm Dixon
This documentary is a sequel to Betty Wolpert's graphic 1986 film Mama I'm Crying which so effectively revealed the injustices of apartheid by allowing the young participants in the struggle to speak for themselves.
Ten years later, Wolpert has returned to speak with those she met during the height of the struggle in the 1980s. She is accompanied by two feisty campaigners, Joyce Seroke, one of the women featured in the first program and now a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and 80-year old Ellen Kuzwayo, now an ANC member of parliament after being denied the right to vote her whole life. Their lively, hopeful and articulate presence is reason enough to watch this sometimes moving documentary.
The program is an appeal from those who suffered most during the reign of the racist regime for the truth of the terrible deeds committed in its defence to be made public. The message is that apartheid's victims can forgive but not forget. They want to forgive, but they also want justice. Listening to those that have been tortured, or lost loved ones, or been imprisoned, it is remarkable that the black majority harbours so little hatred for their white compatriots, that they remain deeply committed to non-racialism. There is a tremendously deep well of good will.
But this is as far the liberal film-maker goes. With the recent acquittal of former apartheid defence minister Magnus Malan and senior generals who oversaw the defence of apartheid throughout the 1980s, that well is in danger of being poisoned. The new ANC government has shown itself unwilling to seriously challenge the economic system, dominated by white capitalists, that underpinned the now defunct racial apartheid. It has refused to systematically root out the servants of the system in the police, the military and the judiciary.
A new era of economic apartheid has begun where everybody, regardless of skin colour, has the right to exploit the labour of other people. The inevitable by-product of this appeasement and collaboration with sections of the old order is that the emphasis in the truth and reconciliation process is on reconciliation and forgiveness, not truth or justice.
A growing number of black South Africans are angry at the brutes of apartheid getting away with their crimes scot free by way of verdicts by former apartheid judges, or through being granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Little in the way of justice has been achieved. This documentary does not reflect this.